‘Global warming’ or 'climate change'?

GaryM | June 1, 2014 at 4:50 pm |

The issue has never been what conservatives called CAGW. The issue has been the manipulation of the language by progressive politicians, media and “scientists.” THEY started adopting the term “climate change” as a defense to the “pause” and divergence of the GCMs from reality.

It’s all a bit of a muddle, isn’t it. You can see there was a sharp increase in the use of ‘climate change’ from the beginning of the new century in the following graph, which comes from SkepticalScience, because I couldn’t capture the original from my computer screen. The data come from Google Scholar, which tracks the use of the terms largely in the scientific community. If you go to Google Books, which covers the more general field, you get a less marked increase at the same time, with climate change also the more important of the two terms. Try as I have done, I can’t get later data than about 2008. I don’t know why.

I don’t expect to have to write about the use of these terms again. I am satisfied that I was more or less right in perceiving an increase in the usage of ‘climate change’ as against ‘global warming’ early in the century. I ought to have expressed what I came to write more clearly, which would have saved me a lot of work. I will leave to others the search for any tantalising evidence about whether those in the orthodox camp thought they needed a better term than ‘global warming’, when plainly the sharp rise in global temperature had fallen away, though the rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide had continued onward and upward in an unchanged way.

But it would be ironic if both sides in the American climate debate had decided to change to the same phrase, but for contrary reasons!